


The Tightrope Walker

by MountainWolve (Queen_Amya)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Based on a painting, Character Study, Circus, Death, Matter of Life and Death, Mentor/Protégé, Painting, Poetry, Short Story, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:40:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28628175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queen_Amya/pseuds/MountainWolve
Summary: A short story based on the painting The Tightrope Walker by August Macke
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	The Tightrope Walker

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a link to the painting  
> https://www.arsmundi.de/de/796848/Bild-Seiltaenzer-1914-gerahmt/796848.html

The thought casually sits on his shoulder like a cheeky, wingless sparrow, which he cannot drive away without losing his balance. It is the idea that he is going to fall and then, overturning, spinning and whirling like a jointed dummy, approaches the ground. He has already come a long way on this breath-thin rope that is stretched out in front of him. 

His teacher, from whom he had learned the art of tightrope dancing, had drawn his attention to this: “If you are over the abyss without a net for the first time, then fear inevitably comes, at the latest somewhere in between, between the beginning and the end, between heaven and earth as they say. You have to live with that. It's part of our job. The only important thing is that you overcome it."  
He is thinking of that now, because he is between the beginning, where the rope still pressed tightly and securely to his soles, whose gently vibrating tremors did not rouse fear in him, but on the contrary was like an encouraging call for courageous venture and carefree discovery - and between the end towards which he strives with each of his carefully groping steps in the air and which, strangely enough, he apparently pushes further and further away from himself, as if, despite all certainty, it was getting more and more distant and unreal. 

His teacher, a great man in his field, had warned him: “Never let this irritating thought that overcomes us all over and over again, maybe every time we practice our art, get into your head! Because then it becomes big and dangerous and flaps around like a confused bird with black wings. This is the beginning of the uncertainty that makes you lose your footing. You have to get him under control again, tame him, best of all drive him out, and otherwise you won't get over at some point. You understand little one? Never forget that!" 

He had asked his teacher Hippolyte where exactly this in-between piece was so that he could arm himself. He had replied: “You cannot measure that; you have to feel it. It comes when it comes."  
Still, especially at the beginning of his career, he had often embarrassedly measured the length of the rope and marked the exact middle between the beginning and the end with a thin yellow ribbon. But he had never noticed during a performance, when he put his feather-white shoes on them, that it was precisely at this point that this thought of staggering and stumbling, the knowledge of the subsequent fall, had actually taken hold of him.  
The fearful bird could come fluttering up and down, some days earlier, some days later, even if it could not yet see the marking on the rope in front of itself or only a few blinks of an eye later when it had already left the yellow band behind itself.  
Today it was different, he was older, he was experienced. He knew that somewhere between the empty sky and the heated, noisy hustle and bustle on earth, fear would seize him; and it was pointless to anticipate the point in time or the spatial coordinates and to try and know it in advance. 

The locations of his performances changed, the rope was always lashed elsewhere, it went higher and then lower over the heads of the onlookers, it sank some days more, then less again, pulled by its own weight.  
Although he should have now turned his attention to the swaying rope and he should have concentrated on the narrow platform that was waiting for him somewhere up there in an all-extinguishing darkness so that he could get safe ground under his feet again, he almost, with his painfully roughened senses, takes in what is going on far below him. Hippolyte had always warned him: “I'm just telling you, even if I haven't always kept to it myself: Look ahead, never look up and never down. Keep your eyes open for the now, seal them from everything else. "

But he cannot follow the advice today. Music flies up to him. He can hear a trumpet suddenly laughing loudly in the dull brass and a harmonica groaning miserably. A drum roll stumbles noisily over the square that arches between the houses, and the simple-minded rhythm breaks on facades and collapses miserably on them like a drunk. A blue shimmer over the entrance to the cash register. Garlands of light sway above the numerous stalls, apparently throwing green and yellow bubbles into the heated air. The greasy smell of food creeps up to him. A clinking laugh wants to get into his ear. An audible word that has escaped their mouths down there swirls up, nests in him. He has not paid much attention to the people down there, but with some of them he would like to join, to sit at a table with them, eating, laughing and drinking without worrying.

But now he suddenly feels a surge of curiosity, an almost breathless lurking, surging silence. His bar leans too much to the left, his palms are damp. He feels a cold draft in his mouth, emptiness on his shoulders, the escaping space. He stops instead of striding. He's now on the magic point, on the in-between piece, he knows it. It is between the earth speckled with colorful life, between this hectic square of a small town with faceless people who seem to wander around haphazardly and cheerfully - and the sky in which the gray threads of twilight have already been torn, where wave after wave one after another pours ever darker blue to the east, where the ink of the night already begins to write the great sleep and dreams. And there goes a black crack through him and he falls; a scream is torn from him, which will later splinter into a thousand individual tones, his eyes are wide open in amazement at all the miracles, he drives towards his impact, which will be so wonderfully soft because the black feathers from his head had run ahead of him and prepared a soft bed for him, artfully.


End file.
